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18 September 2026
(fixed HTML 21 September 2026)
Originally posted 1 July 2026 on Substack.
Sometimes I think about starting a "politics and culture" magazine called The Desert Star. I don’t have the resources or audience to start it now, but here is a manifesto for it. July Fourth is when Americans commemorate the signing of a manifesto of sorts, so maybe this is in season.
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"The Desert Star" refers to stars: faint points of light in the sky that clouds, day, and city lights can obscure, which are independent of what happens on earth and can be guides to navigation. It refers to the desert, living in an undefined, unrewarding, and hostile environment.
This manifesto comes out of my religious and philosophical views as they interface with the public sphere. I have tried to write correct things that change people’s worldviews. As a manifesto, this is more political, more temporal, more mainstream and secular, and manifestos could somehow be taken as metaphors and aesthetics, are more rhetorical. Manifestos are expressions of political art and artistic politics. They are about resonating people as they already kind of agree with you, rather than demonstrating the truth for those who don’t already believe it. This resonating is characteristic of art and politics.
The danger with political-rhetorical speech is that it "fires up the base", producing polarization, rather than adjusting one’s worldview to fit reality. This manifesto is a "self-aware" manifesto, that tries to account for the danger of political-rhetorical speech as a genre.
This manifesto may not be complete, but is something to start with.
--1. The root of reality is free will. Everything is somebody’s decision. Things could be otherwise. The future is not yet fully decided -- good things can become bad and bad things can become good. Opposites of free will include gravity and drift.
--2. Religion requires free will.
--3. Excellence is required for salvation, is far off and yet attainable.
--4. Humans make themselves gods over others through charisma, patronage, and psychological violence, and are made gods by those who seek a savior or devil. But a human made into a god is not worth fearing.
--5. Truth exists independent of the human mind and human culture. It’s possible for people to be wrong. Moral truth exists -- there are good and bad ways to bear witness to it. We don’t automatically know what the moral truth is, and if someone disagrees with us, we have some reason to think we might be wrong.
--6. The good has been shattered and its shards (precious values) are scattered in many different cultures.
--7. Winning creates a loser, who then wants revenge. Those in exile do not win, and must survive. Patience is to refrain from lunging after victory and salvation.
--8. Non-ideal things have their function -- perhaps to make up for the failures of more-ideal things.
--9. Everything interrelates.
--1. Free-willed religion involves presenting choices to people, who can freely choose the right ones. This presentation presupposes freedom of speech and religion. There is a legal form of freedom of speech and religion (e.g. the United States’ First Amendment and its enforcement) but also an unofficial, effective form (whether people feel they can and actually do exercise their legal freedoms of speech and religion, and whether they can and do exercise them despite lack of those legal freedoms).
--2. The truth is spoken by those who have effective freedom of speech.
--3. Competitive culture leads us to throw away what is valuable for what is competitive. Adversarial culture leads to enmity. Both of these can inhibit truth and free will, as does coercion. Adversarial, competitive, and coercive solutions to problems may, unfortunately, turn out to be necessary. But it is bad technique to use them, if non-adversarial, non-competitive, non-coercive ones may be found.
--4. "The answer" to political problems is "missions and/or cultural exchange": vulnerable, interpersonal, intentional, cross-cultural-oriented contact between members of divergent cultures over a long time period. War and capitalism are (seemingly or really) necessitated by international competition, driven by international mistrust. Polarization is driven by mistrust as well. Mistrust driven by lack of serious, basically positive contact with others.
--5. "The answer" to political problems is truth-seeking.
--6. Identity is not found in the body, psychological nature, group belonging, or history, but rather in the exercise of free will. (Regardless of how people perceive you, your background is only your identity if you choose to identify with it.) Identity can be minimized for altruistic purposes.
--7. Politics can be about humans threatening humans, becoming obsessed with humans, making humans into gods. Politics is inherently secular and humanistic. Whereas true religion frees people from humanism.
--8. We will die or become sustainable. Some sustainable societies might be horrifying, some conducive to truth.